PicoBlog

The Wire: Powered by Educators of NYC By Educators of NYC Educators of NYC is a community of NYC public school educators. We are reimagining better public schools for ALL, together. Our priorities are - Equity & Justice, Democracy, Accountability, Responsiveness, Unionism, Professionalism & Pedagogy. ncG1vNJzZmirpZfAta3CpGWcp51kja%2B70aaqnKekqQ%3D%3D

For the Jewish High Holiday season, we wanted to bring you an amazing piece about Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco — an opera set during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. Nabucco is a lasting work of the human spirit, a heart-rending meditation on freedom, dignity, and redemption; its famous aria, “Va, pensiero,” is sung by a chorus of Hebrew slaves and draws inspiration from Psalm 137 (By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept).

There are four main deserts in North America and they are mainly located between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range in northeastern Mexico.  They are Great Basin, Mojave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts.  A desert is sometimes defined as an area of land that receives less than 10 inches of precipitation a year. However, there’s a little more to it than that. In a desert, precipitation isn’t evenly distributed throughout the year.

1. Whenever I think about the art of reading, and how fundamental a practice it is in seeding our culture, I keep coming back to a chapter from Richard Brautigan’s 1964 novel, Confederate General from Big Sur, titled “The Rivets in Ecclesiastes”. It succinctly describes the obsessive degree to which I believe reading should sometimes go in order to consider how a written work is held together. I was, of course, reading Ecclesiastes at night in a very old Bible that had heavy pages.

Much has been written and said about White Rural Rage, a book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman that argues (with more than a little American Exceptionalism) that “rural voters…pose a growing threat to the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.” On one side, critics, including academics whose work is cited in the book, have said that their work is misrepresented. I have no reason to doubt them, and you can read their many critiques online; they are much more capable than I am to talk about their work.

So much great stuff in this newsletter. I am in awe. I couldn't agree with you more about shopping in person vs online. This really speaks to me: "But our eyes can only tell us so much, and our brain fills in the rest with our dreams, insecurities and other impulses." This is exactly why the internet as a whole (and online shopping) is so tempting to us. So much of the human condition is fundamentally rooted in fear: fear of inadequacy, fear of not belonging, fear of "

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon opens in most European countries this week. It is impressive-looking and has been profanely defended even if, as is generally the case with historical biopics, it looks as though it will be flawed and contoured by contemporary prejudices to some degree. It's almost universally true that the history left out of historical epic mov… ncG1vNJzZmiglZ6%2FtbvToZytoJ%2BqtKnAjaysm6uklrCsesKopGioX6O8tXnMsmSnmaCkuaa7zQ%3D%3D

Begin as you mean to go on. Or Start as you mean to continue. Either way, it’s a phrase that’s apparently attributed to the nineteenth-century British religious figure Charles Spurgeon, and it’s a line I’ve heard often from English friends. In recent years, I’ve taken it very much to heart. When I moved into my current home of nine years, I determined to have not only a house-warming party, but several more gatherings soon after.

The Latino customers waited for the tiny farm shop to open, while the Amish employees held sodas in one hand and cigarettes in the other. Where do you think I was? A few weeks ago, when I wrote about small country stores in remote places, one reader gave me a trip idea: go visit Maryland’s Amish Country, out in Charlotte Hall/Mechanicsville in St. Mary’s County. Always looking for interesting places and new ideas, I drove down to this sparsely settled agricultural community in Southern Maryland.